JHU team wins first place at health contest

After completing an internship at the World Health Organization, an opportunity caught the eye of junior Kevin Wang: it was an invitation to compete in the prestigious International Emory Global Health Case Competition. The contest is designed for teams of college students to compete to develop the most innovative solution to a current global health issue.

Wang, a Public Health major, quickly reached out to his friend Aaron Chang, and together they approached students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Their six-person team was assembled in a matter of days, making it the first team from Hopkins to ever participate in the seven years of the competition.

At Emory, the team joined 150 participating students representing 24 universities and 10 countries, and Hopkins ultimately took home the first place title.

Wang described the prompt the team had to work with.

“It is December 2017 and China has become the world’s dominant economic power. A Vice Minister in the Ministry of Commerce wants to design a five-year plan, from 2020 to 2025, and wants global sanitation to be a central part of that,” Wang said.

The team’s role was to act as a consulting firm to design this plan for China.

“The job was that not only were we supposed to make a business case, but to come up with a very specific plan on how to implement that,” Wang said.

After one day to form a plan, the team gave a 15 minute presentation followed by a 10 minute question and answer session. Half of the judges for the competition were leaders in sanitation and the other half were experts on issues relating to China. Judges included the director of the World Bank sanitation program, the Special Advisor to UNICEF’s WASH program, and the President of the China Medical Board.

“We needed to be very knowledge about Chinese culture and also know a lot about sanitation and hygiene,” Wang said. “Even though I previously lived in China, this was more than just about China, it was about the entire world itself. So coming up with how to approach this issue and how to frame our argument and make it into something cohesive was the most challenging part.”

The Hopkins team placed first, and Wang stated that the competition was rewarding for many reasons.

“It was probably the most critical thinking that I’ve done since I’ve come to college,” Wang said.

The experience inspired him to initiate a similar competition here at Hopkins.

“We’re trying to introduce this idea of working in multidisciplinary groups and doing critical thinking to the rest of the Hopkins community,” Wang said.

“We want to hold an internal competition next year for people involved in global health so we can choose a strong team to send to Emory. A lot of the schools that came to Emory held internal competitions to choose the best team. Next year we hope to send a strong team and make Hopkins known for our dominance in this competition.”